Friday, September 30, 2016

Staunton, September 30 – Even though
Islam has made a comeback in many Circassian regions, Naima Neflyasheva says,
it has not generated the kind of radicalization seen elsewhere, largely because
along with the revival of Islam has been a revival of the Adyge Khabze, the traditional code of etiquette that has governed
Circassian behavior.

In the past, that code was seen as
antithetical to the Muslim shariat, the specialist on the North Caucasus at
Moscow’s Institute of Africa says; but today, many Muslim leaders in Circassian
areas view it as complementary to Islam and as having a positive influence on
believers (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/290090/).

Speaking
at a meeting in MGIMO this week, she drew a sharp contrast between Daghestan
and Kabardino-Balkaria where radicalization of Muslims is continuing and
Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Adygeya where “there are no signs of radicalization”
at the present time.

The
Moscow scholar suggested that a major reason for that was the revival of Adyge
Khabze and the support it enjoys among some Muslim leaders in the region goes a
long way to explain why “radicalization has not engulfed the Western Adgys
[Circassians] even though it has affected others.

Neflyasheva’s
argument is important because, given Moscow’s concerns about the radicalization
of Muslim opinion in the North Caucasus, it could provide a justification for
the center taking a more positive stance with regard to the Circassians and to
Circassian traditions and also for Moscow to promote the revival of similar
pre-Islamic value systems elsewhere.

Another
speaker at the session, Akhmet Yarlykapov of MGIMO’s Center for Problems of the
Caucasus and Regional Security, stressed that “re-Islamization in the eastern
regions of the North Caucasus, particularly in Daghestan, has had ‘an explosive
character’ since the disintegration of the USSR.”

According
tohim, “Islam now only has expanded its
influence by increasing the number of mosques, medrassahs, and practicing
Muslims but deepened it by penetrating all sides of the life of society.”At the same time, however, Yarlykapov insisted
that “this must not be the occasion for panic.”

Not
only does the Russian government understand the situation better than it did,
viewing sufism in Daghestan as a positive phenomenon rather than a negative one
as it did in Soviet times, but it also recognizes that some problems are of its
own making, including the failure to bring to justice those who kill imams and the
spread of corrupt and repressive practices.

These
things, like the two Chechen wars, helped radicalize young people in the North
Caucasus and have helped ISIS to recruit as many as 5,000 fighters for its wars
in the Middle East, an exodus that has “not ended up to now.”But Moscow has succeeded in undermining all
radical Islamist “political” projects in the region.

Yarlykapov
stressed that it is a mistake to think that radicalism is largely the product
of poverty. “At present, many quite well-off people are leaving for ISIS,” he
said, some of them because of anger about corruption and repression at home and
the way those things have closed off their opportunities for social
advancement.

The
MGIMO scholar said that those in Moscow who believe that they can use what they
call “’traditional Islam’” as a barrier against radicalization are now at a
dead end. What such people should be asking is whether an individual or group
is “loyal or not,” rather than getting involved in theological doctrine.

Neflyasheva
agreed. She said that the Daghestani authorities should “return to the practice
of the previous head of the republic under whom was conducted a dialogue of
various trends of Islam and adaptation commissions worked.”They should also allow for the creation of a
distinctly Daghestani Islamic educational system and the development of Islamic
thought.

Staunton, September 30 – An official
action in Izhevsk this week has some dangerous implications not only for the more
than 2.3 million members of Finno-Ugric peoples now living within the borders
of the Russian Federation but also and more ominously for the cultural life of
all non-Russians in that country.

At the closure of the highly successful
sixth Finno-Ugric Ethno-Cultural Festival in the Udmurt capital, officials from
the republic’s nationalities ministry said that there might not be another one
in the future, although they were unable to explain why that in fact might be
the case beyond suggesting there were problems with “the format” (idelreal.org/a/28020468.html).

“The
true cause,” Radio Svoboda’s Tatar-Bashkir Service reported, “is to be found in
the deficit of the republic’s budget, the general tendency of the leadership of
the country to contracting cultural activities, and also the lack among the
leadership of the regional nationalities ministry of political will to defend
necessary cultural initiatives.”

If
Moscow succeeds in shutting down such enterprises under the cover of budgetary
problems and via the intimidation of regional and republic elites, many non-Russians
will see their cultural life impoverished and imperiled, none more so that the
smaller nations like the Finno-Ugrics and the numerically small peoples of the North
who have survived by cooperation.

This
is not the first such move against the Finno-Ugric nations living within the borders
of the Russian Federation. In May, the authorities suddenly cancelled the
showing of films by Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian directors, and
subsequently, they blocked Finno-Ugric participation in an international
conference.

The
Finno-Ugric peoples have two major advantages as they seek to defend their
rights as nations. On the one hand, they can look to three Finno-Ugric nations
which now have their own independent states, Estonia, Finland and Hungary, all
of which have shown an intense interest in what Moscow does to their co-ethnics
inside Russia.

Finno-Ugric
journalists in Russia, facing serious problems of keeping their publications
going, have organized an electronic catalogue of these journals as an
alternative to one distributed by post. It will ultimately include links to the
more than 60 journals now issued in Finno-Ugric languages in the Russian
Federation.

And more creatively still, the
Finno-Ugric journalists have agreed that when they visit each other’s home
areas, they will stay with fellow Finno-Ugric journalists from the local
community, thus simultaneously saving money and increasing the awareness of
these numerically small peoples of their common origins and common fate.

Staunton, September 30 – Many
Russian opposition commentators are saying that in the wake of the release of
the report showing Moscow’s culpability in the shooting down of the Malaysian
airliner Vladimir Putin is panicking and fears being hauled before an
international tribunal in the Hague.

But these commentators are wrong,
historian Irina Pavlova says, because Putin recognizes not only that he is not
threatened by such a fate but also that the West has failed to take his measure
and put in place measures that would end or at least limit his use of the strategies
and tactics he has been using (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2016/09/blog-post_29.html).

They are almost certainly wrong, she
says, pointing to the words of another Russian commentator, Ilya Milshteyn,
whose conclusions about what the MH-17 report really means for Putin and a West
that still has yet to take his measure (svoboda.org/a/28018427.html).

“For the first time in all of history, he
writes, “humanity has been taken hostage and for its liberation something as
yet unclear is required: Either capitulation with a further signing of
agreements about the division of the world with the Kremlin, or a clash and
victory, or a longterm policy of patient and exhausting balancing on the edge
of war and peace.”

Milshteyn continues: “Right now, in this
clash of humanity with a most powerful terrorist organization, one Russia hasn’t
banned but chosen has entered a new stage.” But all indications are that “everything
still remains in a fog” with the West still unsure of what it is up against and
how it must act as a result.

If somewhat emotionally expressed, Pavlova
says, this is exactly right because the West still has not recognized that “today
it is dealing not simply with a dangerous figure but with a new type of
political player on the world arena,” one who behaves albeit armed with the
most powerful weapons like a thuggish youth who “spits on rules, obligations,
and Western values.”

Putin is, she says, “aggressive,
purposeful and consistent in his actions,” all facts that many in the West and
in Russia too have failed to take into account.

Pavlova concludes by quoting her own words
of more than a year ago: “Today, from the Western countries and above all the
US wisdom and political will is required to oppose the political challenge
posed by the Kremlin.” This response must be peaceful because in a military
conflict, Putin will use his nuclear weapons (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2015/07/blog-post_48.html).

Therefore, she wrote then and reiterates
now, “the response must be intelligent, precise and unexpected. The Russian
powers that be must be forever deprived of the temptation to build their policy
on human ignorance, lies and disinformation” and thus take away from them the
ability to act in foreign policy by “Stalinist methods of provocation.”

For that to happen, Pavlova says, “it is
vitally necessary to find ‘a key’ to change the policy of the present Russian
authorities, to undermine the pro-Stalinist identity constructed by it within
the country, and to destroy the image of the global world which the Kremlin is
trying to build, using the values and methods of Stalinist great power
approach.”

“Unfortunately,” she writes now, “there is
none of this in evidence yet.” And because there isn’t, Putin isn’t panicking
and will continue to act as he has confident that he can get away with murder
and much else besides.